Repair on mountain landslide going 24 hours

A contractor working for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park repairs a 200-foot section of U.S. Highway 441 on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013, near Gatlinburg, Tenn. The contractor has a May 15 deadline to rebuild the road which was washed away by a Jan. 16 landslide. (AP Photo/Knoxville News Sentinel, J. Miles Cary)

AP

Published: Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 3:07 p.m.

Last Modified: Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 3:07 p.m.

GATLINBURG, Tenn. (AP) — The contractor repairing U.S. 441 where a January landslide took out a section in North Carolina will begin working around the clock on Monday.

The main road between Gatlinburg, Tenn., and Cherokee, N.C., through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is scheduled to reopen by May 15. There are incentives if it is done earlier and penalties if the project falls behind schedule.

Park spokeswoman Molly Schroer told the Knoxville News Sentinel (http://bit.ly/15lseaa) Phillips & Jordan Inc. of Robbinsville, N.C., will begin working through the night next week to get the road finished by the summer tourism season.

Heavy rainfall and an underground stream combined to loosen thousands of tons of rock, soil and trees, which slid the length a football field down a slope on Jan. 16.

Schroer said park administrators on their way to a meeting on the North Carolina side of the 500,000-acre park noticed cracking of the pavement that morning and reported it to park headquarters. By the time a repair crew got there, a 200-foot section had collapsed into a ravine.

The $3.98 million for rebuilding the section is coming from an emergency fund maintained for such purposes as dealing with a road collapse. Schroer said the park has asked the Federal Highway Administration for replacement funds.

Schroer said there is no mechanism to extend the contract if work isn't completed on schedule.

The project is being done at an elevation of 3,200 feet.

The National Park Service released an analysis this week that found park visitors spent $818 million in communities surrounding the Smokies. The figure from calendar year 2012 is based on more than nine million visitors. The report said the visitor spending supported nearly 12,000 area jobs.

Park officials said the number of tourists was off 3.5 percent from the five-year average for January. Fewer than 266,000 people came into the park during the month — the second-lowest visitation in five years. The landslide occurred halfway through the month.

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